que of doctrinaires, Huxley at the head of
them, who believing nothing trumpeted secular education. "Delighted to see
Mr. Forster attacked as playing into the hands of the clergy." Mr.
Gladstone should stimulate by every agency in his power the voluntary
religious energies of the three kingdoms. "The real crisis is in the
formation of men. They are as we make them, and they make society. The
formation of men is the work you have given to the school boards. God gave
it to the parents. Neither you nor Mr. Forster meant this; you least of
all men on your side of the House. Glad to see you lay down the broad and
intelligible line that state grants go to secular education, and voluntary
efforts must do the rest. Let us all start fair in this race. Let every
sect, even the Huxleyites, have their grant if they fulfil the conditions.
As for the school-rate conscience, it is a mongrel institution of
quakerism." How Mr. Gladstone replied on all these searching issues, I do
not find.

IV

The passing of the Act did not heal the wound. The nonconformist revolt
was supported in a great conference at Manchester in 1872, representing
eight hundred churches and other organizations. Baptist unions and
congregational unions were unrelenting. We may as well finish the story.
It was in connection with this struggle that Mr. Chamberlain first came
prominently into the arena of public life--bold, intrepid, imbued with the
keen spirit of political nonconformity, and a born tactician. The issue
selected for the attack was the twenty-fifth section of the Education Act,
enabling school boards to pay in denominational schools the fees of
parents who, though not paupers, were unable to pay them. This provision
suddenly swelled into dimensions of enormity hitherto unsuspected. A
caustic onlooker observed that it was the smallest ditch in which two
great political armies ever engaged in civil war. Yet the possibility
under cover of this section, of a sectarian board subsidising church
schools was plain, and some cases, though not many, actually occurred in
which appreciable sums were so handed over. The twenty-fifth section was a
real error, and it made no bad flag for an assault upon a scheme of error.

(M97) Great things were hoped from Mr. Bright's return to the government
in the autumn of 1873. The correspondence between Mr. Gladstone and him
sheds some interesting light upon the state into which the Education Act,
and Mr. Forster's intr